Odds n’ Ends
Well, over this weekend a lot of things got done, and a lot of other things did not. Most importantly, the much needed cleaning and renovation did not. After the mortgage payment, there’s not much left over. Here’s hoping a family member moves back home with some money to kickstart things.
What also did not get done was to find a good adoptive home for the five brand new kittens gracing our place. Well, sort of new. Old enough to eat like voracious… things that eat a lot. Beautiful gray tigers and one black kitten. Need to get to the vet to get some referrals to adoption centers she trusts. Don’t want them going to some asshole to use to train fighting dogs.
What got done was my decision to move past shock, anger, and denial at the loss of data on an ext3 Linux partition holding my main Fedora Core 3 workstation’s data. I’ve used that box and abused that box for a year, but I made the spectacularly bad decision to remove an old unused Windows XP Home partition and move and resize the Linux partition using Partition Commander. Should have used Qtparted from a Knoppix boot CD instead. Managed to fuck things up so bad that between fdisk, parted, and fsck nothing could be done to retrieve it.
This experience did teach me though that the majority of that partition was Linux stuff. Stuff that I installed as part of the full DVD install with everything including the onions, chilli, and the kitchen sink. I lost some PGP keys which I probably backed up to someplace or not. I lost some source code from dozen projects that I can resurrect from memory and improve on them when I do. I lost pr0n that I can download again anytime I want to get aMule up and running again.
Now into acceptance phase, I decided to go back to experimenting. The FC3 boot disk will allow an FTP/HTTP install no problem. The FC5 disk not. WTF?! Hmmm… I shut down and swap out the cheap CNET Ethernet adapter with a 3Com which I have a case or two of on hand and suddenly the install goes right.
I went out to do some shopping like buying a cheap USB2.0 external HD case to make use of a spare 40GB drive I had on hand which came with a used Dell into which instead went an 80GB drive from the previous Fedora box which had received a 250GB drive before it was rebuilt from Windows to Linux. When I got back, most of the network install was completed.
Things like Really Slick Screensavers don’t want to install due to dependency Hell issues, but sooner or later I’ll manage. The new gnome-screensavers paradigm requires a .desktop file and a .xml file to go with each screensaver. Though I did find a nice way to make the skyrocket screensaver my desktop backround. I can get them on my box, just not where the screensaver preferences tchotchke will notice them, and yes, they’ve been copied to the right places and the .sh migration script run. Oh yeah, the new Gnome interface in FC5 doesn’t allow advanced manipulation of the settings for each screen saver. No advanced tab. Not as my normal login and not as root either.
Oh well.
I got the WinXPPro box to work, fileshare to work, and the USB external HD. Now I can shovel things about without problems.
Meanwhile, the anti-stress pills prescribed for me after a stint at the hospital for chest pains are only making be drowsy and dizzy, not lowering my stress level. No, my heart is fine. Supposedly. Docs bombarded me with radiation and hooked up wires to my nipples, I felt so damn kinky. I was still pulling those sticky tabs off parts of me for two days.
I should, if I can find the interest, start writing more.
Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations
This will be added to on an irregular basis...
- What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
- Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
- Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
- This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
- The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
- The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
- It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Odds n Ends
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